The Day The Soldiers Died
by Bialy
Summary: Everyone has someone they leave behind, however unlikely it might seem. Mello x Sayu in ten chapters.
1. Say This Quick Before It Loses Feeling

Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note, and I'm not participating in the LJ 20 Loves community, I'm just borrowing their theme lines. Idea of using lyrics for the title of a chapter is from keem, and the line her is from Los Angeles by Patent Pending.

Note: This is the first of my ten-chapter pairing fics. Details about that on my profile, to stop me ranting on in author notes as usual. They'll probably be created/updated erratically based on inspiration, but I'm hoping this will be the first one I get through. It's a favourite pairing of mine and I'm happy to explore it some more. Anyway, I hope you enjoy.

x

**The Day The Soldiers Died**

-

**Theme line:**I can't see you, but I know you're there. I can feel you.

_-_

_Say this quick before it loses feeling_

_**-**_

He watches her.

At first, he only uses the monitors. Her day is obscenely routine – his doing, he knows – and he watches as she wakes, her head snapping up and she looks blindly around, startled, uncertain, and forgetting, in those brief moments between sleep and waking, exactly where she is. And then the dirty navy blue cloth obscuring her vision will come into dim and blurry vision, and she'll remember, and fear will overtake her, and she'll start to cry.

Mello watches her intently. There's not much else to do, not for now. They've barely placed the call, and the NPA's little taskforce will still have to make up their mind.

Not that it'll be much of a decision, he thinks, watching one of his less dangerous goons spoon feed the blindfolded Sayu some mashed up vegetables. The only thing Soichiro Yagami will be deciding, if the taskforce doesn't choose to come after Sayu, is whether or not he tells his son he's going alone.

Mello keeps watching Sayu. She drifts off into sleep a few times, and a little while later someone goes into the room to switch the blindfold for a gag. One of his tricks, that – not total sensory deprivation, not for hostages he intends to return. He's found that alternating it, messing with their minds, is a much more satisfactory short run measure.

He takes her the next meal. The gag is still on, and her eyes follow him as he moves across the room. He thinks it's strange, even at the time, but she doesn't seem afraid of him. There's not of the fearful apprehension he sees when she watches the other guards, none of the trembling terror as they loom over her. No, this is different...this is slow suspicion, careful calculation, and there, somewhere, hidden at the back of her steady gaze, the decision to reserve judgement.

He doesn't even know why this makes him angry, but it does. Resentment and fury bubble up inside him, pulling his lips back into a snarl. She's _judging _him? This skinny little girl who's at _his_ mercy, whose life is in _his_ hands - she's sitting there, and just – just –

But it's not even that, is it? Because he expects her to hate him, expects her to be afraid of him, expects her to judge him a monster. No, no. It's the reservation that gets to him. The fact that she _hasn't_ judged him. Like she thinks he's going to change. Like she thinks he's different. Like she thinks he's _good_.

Sayu cries out into the gag as his hand whips across her cheek. Without thinking, he tips the soup he's carrying over her, and throws the bowl against her chest. It's hot, and she cries out again, and somewhere deep inside him, Mello feels a sick satisfaction. He turns and strides out of the room. No one stops him. No one questions him.

No one dares.

As soon as he's out of the room, he orders one of the guards to blindfold her again, and keep it that way this time. The man does as he's told.

For an hour or so he doesn't watch the monitors.

When he turns back to them – calm again, focused, removed – he doesn't see the broken, sobbing, defeated little girl he'd expected. If anything, Sayu looks stronger than before, and defiant. He can't see her eyes but her chin is raised, her lips are drawn tight, and not a single sob is shaking her body. He stares at the monitor, half admiring and half aghast, before putting his fist through the glass.

When he returns from having the wound bandaged, a new leather glove obscuring the evidence, the monitor has been replaced, and Sayu is sitting as silently and proudly as before. He issues the order for her to be cleaned up, and tells someone to get her some more food.

Late that night, when almost everyone on the base is asleep and he thinks Sayu will be, too, the guard on duty nods Mello into the room. Her head is bent forward, and she's wearing different clothes – faded black pants, an oversized stained shirt. Replacements for the ones he soiled.

He doesn't make a sound as he enters the room. Despite the cavernous ceiling, despite the wet stone floor, despite his heavy boots, he's learnt to walk quietly, to walk silently. He hovers back in the shadows, out of sight of the monitors. He watches her.

Her head doesn't move. Her chest rises and falls rhythmically, and he assumes she's asleep. He thinks about how strange this girl is to him, and how he didn't expect this at all. He thinks about being fifteen and running away and wonders if she's ever done anything like that. If she's even thought about it.

And then she speaks.

"I can't see you, but I know you're there. I can feel you."

Her voice is hoarse and a little cracked. He's not surprised. After the initial screaming he's come to expect from female hostages, Sayu had resorted to howling obscenities at anyone who came near her, screaming death threats and declaring her intent to castrate every one of them. She's quieted down eventually, but now, Mello finds the silence more unnerving.

He doesn't answer her.

"I know you're there," she says again, and her head still doesn't move. She doesn't care, he thinks. It's like she's just bored. "I don't think it's time for me to eat, and I know you are the one who decided not to feed me earlier."

Her English is good, even though she takes her time selecting some words. Mello stays silent, decides he'll let her have her little speech.

"It must be very lonely for you here."

He hadn't expected that.

He crosses the room, loudly now, boots slapping against the floor and the sound echoing off the walls. He grabs her hair – more tightly than he normally would, he can't help but notice – and pulls her head back. Sayu makes one, small, sudden gasp of pain, and then pulls back her composure.

"What do you mean?" he says, and his voice is low, feral, growling.

He is surprised that she answers him as readily as she does. "You are not like the others. You must not feel at home here."

He pulls her hair again. She winces, but doesn't make a sound. It's a power struggle, he thinks. And right now they're level pegging.

"Don't be stupid. I run this place."

"But you don't belong here."

"Ha."

"You don't belong anywhere, do you?"

And it's her tone that does it. Her tone that makes him unwind his fingers from her hair, step backwards, lose his tongue.

She isn't mocking him. She isn't taunting him. She isn't trying to insult him or emasculate him. She's trying to...

She's trying to reach him. Like she sympathises, like she pities him. But this time there's not fury, no swell of hatred. There's just coldness, shock, and a slow, dawning, horrific realisation that that's exactly the thing he's been afraid to put into words since he was six years old.

"You watch your tongue," he threatens, but his voice shakes, and he can't focus properly.

Sayu hangs her head. "I'm sorry," she says, and to Mello, she really sounds like she means it. But what exactly she's sorry about, he can't tell. Without another word, he turns, and leaves.

But he takes her the next meal. And this time, he doesn't throw it over her.


	2. You And Me Are So Blind

Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note, Mello or Sayu. The lyrics line is the same song as the last chapter, Patent Pending's Los Angeles. I'm going to try for all the lyric lines in this fic being from that song.

Note: Yeah I meant to update this faster. I don't know if this works very well as a MelloxSayu pairing story because it feels like I forced it, so please let me know what you think. I am horrible at writing pairings, which is of course what this is an exercise in practicing. I did enjoy describing Mello here though. And always. As anyone who reads my stuff will notice, I go off on rambling lyrical descriptions about Mello, because apparently I am in love with him. Anyway, enjoy.

x

**Chapter Two**

-

**Theme line:** You're worth it.

-

_You and me are so blind_

-

There is never enough time.

Sayu is there for days, at the most. In any normal situation that would not be enough time for anything. Not time for her to get to know Mello, not enough time for Mello to get to know her. The time they spend together is best measured in hours, in snatches at mealtime and in the dead of night. In total, they spend perhaps four hours in the same room.

The final time he comes to her, her father is on the way. It is just before they are going to release her, trade her for a slim black notebook and the reins to Death's mantle. The guards are outside, and he enters.

He is a skinny boy of eighteen or so. He's all wiry limbs and a kind of strange, untapped fury, energy all bound up and fizzling through his nerves. He's like electricity in the air, and his touch is like static when his hand falls onto Sayu's arm.

"You're older than me, do you know that?"

He is looming over her, looking down, head cocked to one side. Sayu notes, as she always does, that his hair is perfectly cut, a straight line across. Not mafia.

"I didn't know that," she says, though she's guessed. Her voice is dry, hoarse. She coughs.

"Cover your mouth." He smiles wryly. It's funny, she knows, because her arms are tied. He is making a joke. That means he probably won't kill you. Then he says, "Your father is on his way."

"My…father?"

"Yeah. Dad. Soichiro Yagami. Him? Yeah, he's coming to get you." There is a sudden pressure where his palm meets her arm as he propels himself away from her. He takes long, loping strides away from her, the same walk he always uses, paradoxically lazy and energetic all at once. Sayu thinks of him as a coiled spring, desperate to release and just expend all the power tied up inside him, to race and rage and laugh and _fly_, but forcing himself to be calm, to be slow, to be in control.

She imagines Mello to be at his happiest when he is running, nothing to control and nothing controlling him, feet pounding the ground until it feels like he is taking off.

That, she decided, after their first encounters, is the strangest thing about Mello. He does not belong here, and unlike the rest of her kidnappers, she does not mind thinking about him being happy.

He is different. He paces the edge of the room she is in, circling her, like he's just burning up extra energy. He's crazy, she knows that much. He acts like he is drunk on life, like he believes nothing can touch him, like he is invincible. Like a child, Sayu thinks, like she was when she was a child, running and jumping and not associating the risks with the faraway, foreign concept of death. The other mafia men walk and act like they have conquered death, like they have made themselves invulnerable - Mello, he walks like he always has been, like he doesn't even know he _can_ be hurt.

"Are you going to let him take me home?" she asks, because she can't think of anything else, and his rhythmic pacing is making her dizzy.

"Huh?" Mello draws up short, behind her. Quick, heavy footsteps of leather boots with silver buckles tramp up to her and past her and he whirls around, like he's on a stage. He drops to the ground very suddenly, with his legs splayed and his knees up.

"Are you going to let my father take me home?" she asks again. She does not lower her voice and drop her gaze the way she does when other people here speak to her, or she speaks to them. Because Mello is different.

"Yeah. If he upholds his end of the deal."

Sayu doesn't know what deal he means. She doesn't ask, but Mello, studying her face, smirks a little.

"You have no idea what you're in the middle of, do you?"

Sayu raises her chin. "The Kira investigation," she says. She knows _that_. "If you're lonely why don't you leave?"

Mello blinks and looks at her. "Where on earth did that come from?"

"I've just been thinking," she says, carefully, selecting the English words. "I don't have that much to do down here."

Mello barks a laugh, and it's an odd sound. Everything about him is so feline - the sleekness of his body, the angles of his eyes, the way he walks, his hair. It is strange to her that his laugh should be so different. "Oh yeah? And what have you been thinking about?"

He's far more light-hearted than he was when they first met. That was only a day or two ago, though, wasn't it? But he seems to have fallen into ease around her, and Sayu thinks she might know why.

"I'm your hostage and you spend time down here talking to me. You complain about the mafia men you don't like and you talk about TV shows. You don't have any friends."

He laughs again. "Sayu, this is the mafia. None of us are friends here."

"Yes," she persists, "but I know the others talk to each other. You don't. You are very, very different to them."

Mello does not laugh this time. Instead, he climbs to his feet, and meanders towards her. "How are you so sure?" he asks, his voice a purr, dropping a few octaves as he leans over her.

"I can tell," she says, and she knows he's trying to intimidate her. She knows she should be frightened. Inexplicably, unbelievably, she isn't. "You want to talk to me because I am…" She frowns, looking for the words. "I don't want to say normal, that is not the right word. I am…adjusted? I have a good life. A happy life. My father is giving you something very important to get me back."

Mello shrugs. "You're worth it, I guess. To him." Despite himself, there is curiosity behind the madness in his eyes.

She ploughs on. "I go out at the weekends and watch movies. I go to shops and there are no guns or bombs or people dying. I have a normal life. And you have never had that."

Something flickers in his eyes. They are a deep, violent blue, like electricity, like the ocean in the middle of a storm, like a tempest. "How would you know something like _that_?" he murmurs, one hand closing around her shoulder, close to her neck. "You barely know me."

"Because teenage boys with normal lives do not join the mafia and kidnap girls."

Mello looks at her, wide eyed, for a second, before letting out a side-splitting laugh. He leans backwards, away from her, and raises a hand to his head. Sayu frowns. Did she say something stupid?

"Oh, Sayu. I do wish your dear old dad wasn't on the way, because I would _love _to spend more time with you." And then he's over her again, bending again to bring his face next to hers. "Do you want to know why I've spent so much time down here chatting to a hostage? It isn't because you have a normal life and I want it. It's because of the way you think." He taps her forehead with his forefinger, before running it through her matted hair. She shivers.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean…listen to what you just said! That's so _simple_. Teenage boys with normal lives do not join the mafia. See? It's simple! It's _obvious_. You don't try to complicate it, you don't try to add things, you don't project, you don't rationalise…" He shakes his head, laughing, and his hand is in her hair. Sayu notices - not for the first time - that his face is desperately, painfully beautiful.

"I don't understand," she says, dubiously.

He smiles, and to her great surprise, there is an alarming degree of fondness behind the smile. "I do like you, you know. I didn't think I would, but - I can't explain it. You're _nice_. I haven't known someone nice in years. I haven't known someone who just says what they're thinking and doesn't over-complicate things in an even longer time. I like talking to you. Isn't that weird?"

"Yes," Sayu says honestly, because it is. He kidnapped her.

He laughs again and, for a shocking, impossible moment, he is every bit a teenager, young and just enjoying the moment. How did they get here, she thinks, from him slapping her face and throwing food over her? Their conversations had changed, slowly, from her being afraid to speak to him encouraging her to, and him changing from verbally attacking her to enquiring into her comments, her thoughts. It was strange. It was very, very strange. Some of it was rooted in a loneliness she could see in him, as plain as the nose on his face, and some of it, some of it was rooted in something else, something she felt too - a strange kind of churning longing in her stomach that she'd never felt before -

"It is weird," he confirms, looking at her oddly. "But I like you, Sayu Yagami. I really do. I think I will be sad to see you go."

"I can't say the same," she replies, smiling just the smallest bit. "But…I think I am pleased to have met you."

"Even though I kidnapped you?" he quirks an eyebrow.

"Yes. I think so."

And it's strange, it's so strange, that they've got here. Two people born across the globe from each other, pushed together by the machinations of brains and brilliance, sitting here in a dark, dingy little room in a mafia base. This should never have happened, this odd camaraderie, because they are on opposite sides of the fence. They are different _people_. But, Sayu thinks, Mello is fascinating, every facet of his personality, every shift of his mood. It's like holding a prism up to the sun and seeing a thousand different colours come shattering out. Mello can never be known, she decides, at the same moment she decides that she _wants_ to know him, more perhaps than she wants to know anything else.

He is regarding her with his mad blue eyes. There is something she hasn't seen before in his eyes, but she recognises it. He moves closer, his breath warm on her face. It smells of chocolate. She wonders if he tastes of it, too.

"I'm going to kiss you," he says, as if the realisation has just occurred to him.

Sayu knows she is dirty and probably looks like hell, and hasn't had much of chance to wash since she got here. She probably smells like goodness knows what and here, above her, is this brilliant, blazing boy, like nothing she's ever known before, like _fireworks, _like fiery rain on icy grass, wanting to kiss her.

He leans forward, suddenly, crushing her in a hard, harsh kiss. It hurts, but Sayu finds herself kissing him back, unable to stop herself. He is more than fire.

He pulls away, looking at her like he's seeing her for the first time. He passes a hand over her head, smoothing her hair.

"Maybe I'll look you up sometime," he says, with a roguish wink. Sayu thinks maybe it's a joke. She thinks maybe it's not. With a final flash of a smile, a final glint of diamonds and leather and tempest and gold, he is gone.

She will probably never see him again.


End file.
